


Love Cannot Hide

by darknessvisible



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Han Solo Is A Bad Dad, Lots of Sex, Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Protective Poe Dameron, Rey Dameron, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey Solo, Reylo endgame, Scavenger In A Wedding Dress, Sex, Slow Burn, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Unresolved Sexual Tension, You Have Been Warned, but don't worry because, but he loves his boy, lol, smut in later chapters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:48:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22342864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darknessvisible/pseuds/darknessvisible
Summary: One day Ben receives a letter to his wedding. Or, what should have been his wedding.
Relationships: Finn & Rose Tico, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Poe Dameron & Rey, Poe Dameron/Rey, Rey & Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo
Comments: 11
Kudos: 45





	1. The Envelope

* * *

The envelope stared at him. 

It was trimmed with gold, coiled about the corners like four serpents meeting as one, daring him to open the fold and, perhaps, suffer their venom in the process. 

He wouldn’t half mind it, in fact, if the coils came to life and bit him, four little pricks of fate, bled him dry or at least poisoned his blood enough to convince the rest of society to leave the venomed mess that was once Ben Solo behind. He wouldn’t mind it one bit. 

He knew this day would come, but that didn’t make the letter any less devastating. 

Ben could avoid phone calls, he could disregard emails and politely dodge the inquiries from mutual friends, but he could not--he could never--look away when the last bit of his heart sealed itself shut with someone else’s name. 

She would become Rey Dameron now. 

And he would become a sunken ship, all rotten and full of half-finished conversations. Left to swell on the bluish, parted lips of guests that never left the stateroom when the final iceberg hit. 

Ben fiddled with his tie, knees knocking against the underside of the far too small kitchen table he never got around to replacing. 

Rey used to sit on top of that very same kitchen table for him, with her legs spread open, purring his name. The name he longed to give her. 

At some point he would either have to open the envelope, or burn it. 

And yet, morbid curiosity tempted him in both ways--find out the exact date and time he would lose his lover forever? Or never know the exact moment she gave herself away? Both possibilities boasting equal torture. 

He thumbed the opening of the smooth white vellum material, thinking again of Rey sitting on that very same table, his very same thumb smoothing itself across another opening he teetered on the edge of. But that was for her pleasure. This--this was for his pain. 

Ben slowly pulled the flap out, flinching preemptively at the chance those coiled snakes might strike. Nothing happened. Inside he saw more gold, calligraphy that gave away how expensive the wedding would be. Poe had made his fortune in the hotel business--something Ben had always assumed Rey hated about him--but here she was, announcing to the world in scripted decadence, that she very much did not hate Poe Dameron’s wealth. Or any part of him, really. 

Ben thought back to a childhood vacation, one of the first Poe had come along to with the Solo family. His parents had recently passed away and Leia insisted on Ben’s kindness towards the orphaned boy. She was not wrong to request a bit of tenderness from Ben, nor did he struggle to oblige, but it was Poe who wanted nothing to do with a new older brother. It was always Poe who wanted things, and Ben who waited for things to happen. 

Until, of course, he met Rey Kenobi. She had drawn him out of his own trepidation, and he chased her like electricity in the night, streaking across the sky with promises of gold at the end of the trail. And she was gold. She was every bright and yellow thing in this world. She was the overspill from Olympus, the divine liquid that Ben Solo had searched all his life for the taste of. 

He tasted her, they tasted each other. 

At one point, Ben thought they would remain like that always, two cups catching the light through one another. Always full, always fragile. 

But then that didn’t happen. 

And now, the wedding invitation resting flatly in his hand reminded him that when Poe Dameron wanted something, it didn’t matter whose cup he knocked over to get it. 

> “We are delighted to invite you to share with us in the celebration of a most loving union between Rey Kira Kenobi and Poem Dameron on the Fourteenth of October”

Ben gulped, counting down the few short months between now and October. 

His heart pounded like the brute it was--a fist demanding to be let in, or let out, he never knew anymore. 

All he knew was that a year ago things were so different, and now this life--one he could not recognize through the fog of chances and mistakes--no longer felt worth living. 

He gingerly slid the invitation back into the envelope, folding it shut and placing it ceremoniously in the center of the kitchen table, as though he might one day use it to summon her back. 

To summon back everything they had. 

But he would not. 

Instead, he would let it collect dust there as he, too, collected himself in the wait. 

* * *

The cordless telephone rang for the fourth time, rattling so hard it nearly fell off the receiver. Ben swiveled his chair towards it, swiping up the old relic in his bulky hand. 

“Yes, hello?” He spoke into the static that greeted him. No sound came in return. “Hello?” 

More silence.

“Are you the person who keeps calling?” Ben hooted, shuffling around the papers splayed out on his desk. “Can you tell me who you are?” 

Again, silence. 

“If you aren’t going to speak, why do you keep calling?” His question was met with the dial tone. 

Sighing, his phone slid down his cheek and plopped onto the desk. After a minute or two it began wailing to be put back on the receiver. 

Of all the jobs he’d taken up in the wake of Rey’s departure--having coincided with the loss of his job as a top Executive at one of the leading consulting firms in London, First Order LLC--this one was perhaps the most vexing. He sat inside a call booth all day, taking messages on a dial-pad phone while people occasionally tapped on the window and asked when ticket sales began for the show tonight. The cramped office had barely enough space for him to stand at full height. 

Another phone rang--this one his personal cell. Ben had to shift awkwardly just to get enough room to straighten out his leg in order to retrieve the phone from his pocket. 

“Hello?” 

“Are you screening my calls?”

“Oh, hi mom.” 

Leia Organa-Solo coughed into the phone, her frustration easily reaching him. He knew what was coming next, in fact he had been dreading it ever since getting that envelope in the mail. 

“Did you see it?” Her stern tone did not waver, though Ben knew she felt some measure of sympathy for him. The impenetrable directness was how she showed it. 

“Yes.” 

“Are you going?” 

“No.” 

A pause. 

Ben hadn’t expected his mother to fight him on this; after all, what an odd request it would be, to ask her biological son to come to the wedding of his ex-fiancee and her adopted son. And yet, Leia’s pause persisted. 

“Is everything ok?” A question that should have been reserved for him.

“I need you to do this for me,” Leia finally spoke. “It’s Han… he’s sick. And he wants to see the whole family together.” 

As fathers went, Han Solo wasn’t a winning ticket. 

Nor was he terribly invested in the structure of a family, having spent most of Ben’s youth out on business trips. 

It was hard for Ben to love him, and even harder to face the shame of that fact, but after years of therapy Ben had found a comfortable spot to observe his father. 

And that was from afar, with little contact. 

His stomach curled, guiltily searching inside itself for a more meaningful reaction to what his mother had just shared with him. He didn’t feel much at all. 

Leia must have sensed the battle going on inside her son for she added, “He specifically asked for you. He said, ‘I want my boy here’.”

A small flare punctured the wall of numbness in his chest. 

It had been almost two decades since Han had called him that. 

The thought of facing Rey once again terrified him, reasons not the least of which being the sunlight she kept locked up in her and how it could burn Ben Solo to boneless ash. 

But, there was the matter of what Han Solo kept locked up inside him. 

The love he could have given. The kindness he could have shown. The care, the interest, the desire to share himself with his son, and in doing so giving Ben something to understand himself with--a compass, of sorts, towards home. 

It was this consideration that hesitated Ben’s lips. Plucked them into the whine of a violin, seeking a note to set forth upon. After a time, “Alright. I’ll come to the wedding.”

As the words played themselves string by string, Ben could feel himself contract. He wondered if there would be anything left of Ben Solo come October fifteenth. 

* * *


	2. The Two Castles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "That night, Ben’s dreams were not kind to him. 
> 
> They tossed him about like a loom, weaving with great ferocity, from the scraps of Rey in his mind’s eye, every hoarse utterance of their love."

The first thing Ben Solo did every morning was run. 

Too simple a task for escaping, it was instead an attempt to stay, in a sense. If he could, like a heating rod, extinguish his own combustion by pounding it mercilessly into something else, then perhaps he could ebb along life’s current to the next milestone. 

He took the next two months as a practice. 

A life of misery, disconnected from purpose, austere and willing to, at any moment, erupt in penance for his sins; Rey, letting her leave, letting himself teach her how to. 

At work he answered the phone like a man ashamed of mourning, as though he might be instructing the funeral-goers not to park in the lot across the street, so robotic in his dedication to pantomime disaffection long enough to adopt it as truth. 

“ _Yes, that’s correct_ .” He would mumble. “ _No, but I can hold tickets under Will Call_.” 

Somewhere around mid-afternoon he would string himself up, mentally berating all the things he could not change. 

It was a deeply reverent act, after how long he’d spent looking elsewhere for problems to lament; in absence, in quietness, in doubt. 

He would pick at the remnants of Rey’s presence in his mind, like a bored vulture, near starvation but unable to cease its basest instinct; to recollect the dead. Make food out of tragedy. 

And Ben Solo ate, like the king of all vultures--all creatures who pantomimed, too. 

When it came to actual food, however, Ben was circumspect. 

He was not a picky eater but his appetite did little to conceal the tempest within. The more he agonized over a feeling, the less he seemed to use his mouth. Not just to eat, but to speak, be it to himself or others, to make sound out of what simmered within.

A month into the slow march, his mother called again. 

“You haven’t been spending much.” 

Leia didn’t ask for permission when it came to her son. She had loved him too long to partake in his drawbridge battles to acquire even a modicum of real feeling, let alone trust. 

“I’m busy at work. Not a lot of time to eat.” 

“Han’s been… been good. How are you?” 

Ben sucked the air between his teeth. Another sensation swelling to capture the dead crunch of chords struck at the sound of his father’s name. He wouldn’t admit aloud that this piece of news eased something for him. 

“I’m working.”

“You sell tickets all day.”

He took it as an accusation. Shifting in his too small chair, Ben spoke over the rickety creaking. “Is there a specific reason you called?” 

Silence. 

There was a curtain surrounding her soundless reply; she was protecting something. 

Ben briefly thought of the days after returning from their first childhood vacation together--Poe newly orphaned, Ben gripped by his own new, fragile responsibility. Poe had constructed a makeshift bed in Ben’s playroom, and the only Solo child tried to tend to their new bond by making himself a bed right beside Poe’s. But it had only stoked anger in Poe, causing the small boy to sleep outside until Leia came around to check on them. 

Thus began the narrative between them, Ben the older brother who could never understand, and Leia the mother who spared her son’s shadow for another, smaller, cloudless version of him; Poe, the sun, Ben, the horizon. 

And now, Rey, the colors that bled between them. 

“I’ve been informed of something and I think you should know.” 

Ben’s massive hand gripped the cell phone, bracing. 

“It was her non-negotiable.” 

“What?” Ben’s voice strained, having expected other words. He didn’t even comprehend these ones.

“Inviting you to the wedding.” 

Leia’s voice was serene, something she often employed at the peak swell of a conversation between them--emotions in danger of spilling over the drawbridges they both used to ferry love between mother and son. She would calm the waters in her mote, letting him take heed and do the same. 

But it hardly ever worked.

Ben could feel himself surging upwards, spilling out around their truce and spinning headlong into a place she could not follow. 

He tossed the phone onto the desk, causing a perfectly jagged crack to run all the way down from the top left corner of the glass screen to the place his thumb had worn down over the years. 

Wear and tear he and Rey took equal part in. 

Weeks of her calling him and begging for a proper conversation only to be met by dial tone after dial tone. 

She came to know his silence more intimately than she had ever known his joy, and for that Ben couldn’t blame her. 

But for this--for refusing to let him go without first implanting the notion that she might desire, in some part, a proximity from him--he did blame her. 

Gingerly picking the now cracked phone back up, he muttered, “I have to go.” Leia said nothing. 

* * *

An hour later, the office phone rang. 

Ben was across the small office, half committed to slurping a cup of microwave ramen. When he heard the ringer, he had a mouthful of scalding hot noodles, the cup nearly engulfed by his fingers. 

He leveraged the wall to push himself back towards the desk, bringing the ramen with him. 

Which turned out to be a bad idea when it spilled all over his lap just as he picked up the line. 

“Shit!” He yelped, perhaps a bit too dramatically, at the burning sensation blooming down his thigh. 

To his surprise, a strangled gasp came from the other end. 

Though it was not the sound itself that had Ben Solo frozen in place, the steaming water now pooling around his knees. It was its familiarity. He knew that noise as devoutly as he knew the worn pad of his phone, always hanging up, always running. 

“Rey?” His disbelief coiling around the words, like wind poised to carry them away at any moment. 

The dial tone. 

He blinked, stinging with hot liquid. 

Some from the spilled ramen, and some, mutinously, springing down his cheeks.

* * *

That night, Ben’s dreams were not kind to him. 

They tossed him about like a loom, weaving with great ferocity, from the scraps of Rey in his mind’s eye, every hoarse utterance of their love. 

* * *

A week before the wedding, while Ben was browsing flights on his phone, the office extension starting ringing. It was mid-afternoon. 

“Hello?” He never used the name of the theater company when he answered. Why bother, when he came here to hide?

There was a brief static on the other end. 

“I heard you were working at _Staghorn_ , but I didn’t believe it.” 

Ben’s throat seized itself, clamping down. 

“Never thought I’d see the day.” The voice chuckled, but it was hollow. A habit--gestures from childhood that could never be outgrown. 

Ben’s voice gave way, clotted and deep, “Poe.” 

“Don’t make a thing out of it, ok? I’m just calling because--well, I need you to do me a favor, Solo.” 

Now it was Ben borrowing from his mother’s silence in order to protect something; himself. 

“Solo?” 

On instinct, Ben had already begun lowering the receiver. But something small--like a fish hook--reeled him back in. 

Curiosity. Leia's words from last week ringing in his ears.

“I haven’t heard from you in a year.” 

A scoff brokered Poe’s response. “I know. What a shame.” 

“You regret it?” 

“No, I meant, what a shame to bring an end to that.”

Ben’s curiosity morphed into possession. It wasn’t for Poe to reject him. Not this time. "If you're going to be a prick, I just won't come." 

"Fuck off. Are you capable of thinking about _anyone_ besides yourself?" These words were not strangers between them. 

"Who is it I should be thinking of?" He dared the man on the other line to set them both free. And Poe, who knew his unchosen brother so well, sensed the real question he was being asked. 

"She wants you to _move on_ , Solo. It's all about new beginnings."

New beginnings to old fires, Ben mused to himself, and without another word he slammed the receiver down like a bug, mercilessly squashing whatever had just happened there.

His cell phone, splayed before him, lit up to the webpage of flights he'd pulled up earlier. His irises, blown open like wounds, reflected his pitted heart coming to a terminal realization. She wanted him there. She _wanted_ him to _watch._ And why wouldn't she? Ben roughly grabbed at his phone, closing out of the browser. After all he'd done to her, she wouldn't be a survivor without a small amount of bitterness, too. 

Checking his watch, Ben numbly stood up and left his office three hours before it actually closed, his eyes still tourmaline stones, barely glossed by the light they chased on the drive home.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here be art and music that inspired this chapter:
> 
> [lovely](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xirk18P889U)  
> [ben solo running](https://66.media.tumblr.com/7f5fc4361c01d52d776f59288a279be5/b7c11e07a38aa366-96/s540x810/18036535c59d31ca88315864513dc7c408f99573.gifv)
> 
> thank you for the lovely reviews and comments about the writing style, I'm floored to have such careful readers and excited to feed you more of angsty ben and, very soon, a Ben and Rey reunion. ♥

**Author's Note:**

> And so, the angst-fest begins.


End file.
